The present proposal was submitted in the interest of furthering our understanding of the cause(s) of specific reading disability as well as to facilitate continuance of programmatic research already initiated in the area. Previous research in the area has focused primarily on four major hypotheses in explanation of reading disability: the perceptual deficit hypothesis, the intersensory deficit hypothesis, the serial deficit hypothesis and the verbal deficit hypothesis. Our research to date, along with the findings of others, cast serious doubt on the validity of the first three of these, and provide suggestive evidence for the fourth. Thus, we are interested in continuing our exploration of the verbal deficit hypothesis. An initial grant (NIH No. 1R01HD0965801) facilitated the conduct of four studies evaluating various aspects of verbal processing in both poor and normal readers: two comparing these groups on measures of semantic process, one assessing group differences on phonologic processing and another evaluating the possibility that they differ with respect to inter- versus intra-hemispheric processing. These studies are virtually completed (one is already published) and initial findings are promising. The present proposal seeks to extend these findings, and evaluate, more fully, our belief that reading disability is associated with dysfunction in verbal processing. We are also interested in comparing age differences among reader groups; thus, we will contrast the performance of poor and normal readers in second and sixth grades.